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Comment by pezgrande | Hacker News Reader

I like Zig but stopped learning it when I realized that all project based on it requires a specific version of the compiler to build.

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The situation will improve once they release a stable 1.0 version.

Until then, use mise, nix, docker, or something similar. (You should be doing this anyway for projects in all languages if you care about them building on anyone's machine other than your own.)

I would be interested to learn why that is a problem. As a new Rust learner, I am curious.

It might not be the version you have installed, or the same version as another project you want to glue together into a single application.

wow. this is a major miss from Zig.

on top of the decision to ban AI, I can see that we haven't seen the last of bad decisions from Zig

It is still in active development and before v1. They haven't decided to make it unstable on purpose it's simply not done yet.

Anyone using it right now implicitly accepts that they'll have to keep track of the changes in the language and update their code accordingly.

The language is almost 10 years old and they are not planning a v1.0 anytime soon afaik.

Depending on how you look at it, Rust went like 9 years from inception to v1 (2006-2015). C went ~17 years before initial standardization (1972-1989).

Rust has editions, which can be mixed and matched between different dependencies. AFAIK Zig does not have this.

Historically, say, 15 years ago before 1.0, Rust too was always shifting about and so you'd find that the software you wrote last month now doesn't even compile and the advice has changed.

Today most people write entirely stable† Rust, and as somebody else mentioned Rust uses Editions to allow it to make any remaining language improvements, but if you were writing mostly unstable Rust you would see a reduced version of the same churn. Last month you could foozle.boozle() and that gets you a Wibble, but then you upgraded and now foozle doesn't have a boozle method, and apparently Wibbles no longer exist at all, everybody says you need to learn about Wumps instead now because those are apparently better or something?

† If you don't use a "nightly" build of Rust or a special opt-in "nightly mode" your Rust compiler only recognises the stable language.

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